Unofficial news and tips about Google

October 26, 2012

A New YouTube UI Experiment

YouTube continues to test new user interfaces. The latest experiment doesn't bring a lot of changes: the sidebar has a new color scheme, YouTube shows more subscriptions at a time, some icons have been removed and the default section is called "now playing".

There are new icons for the "like"/"dislike" buttons, there's a new way to show the navigation sidebar and the "more from" section has been removed.

The homepage looks a lot different if you're not signed in. YouTube shows popular videos from topics like entertainment, sports, news, movies. The topic pages are automatically generated by YouTube.

37 comments:

How do I prevent YouTube from reverting to the standard UI whenever I restart Chrome? I want to keep the new interface and not have to paste the code in each time. I have Chrome set to "Allow local data to be set" but when I restart Chrome it still reverts.

Make a Greasemonkey Userscript. Pasting the above lines into the script and setting the script for *.youtube.com/* should run it everytime you visit Youtube. Although you might have to refresh the page to make it take effect.

I haven't tried this myself yet as I'm away from my PC but it should work.

It's a more rounded and sports a little more chrome than Google's recent redesign efforts, but the new YouTube Cosmic Panda experiment does bring the darker UI elements and polished feel of Google+ to the video sharing service.

I specially hate those recommended channels on the right sidebar. They are completely useless to me and such a waste of screen estate. The channels recommended never seem to change and they are mostly garbage anyway. I subscribe to channels because of their content and not their icon or name so I'd really prefer to see recommended videos/content on there instead as previously.

You also end up having to click 'watch history' and then 'my viewing history' to be able to see the option to clear history which is 'unnecessarily redundant'. I really miss the ribbon at the top as well which was pretty helpful to get to playlists quickly. Trending videos was another really useful feature to see what's happening or popular right now but that too seems to be gone.

Mixing recommended videos with subscriptions has to be by far the worst part of it though. Many of the recommended videos end up being content which I've already seen and for them to waste the space occupied by videos from channels I'm actually subscribing to and want to watch is frankly a horrible idea. It reminds me of Digg's pathetic attempts are trying to aggressively force content on to users and I for one am not a fan of it at all.

Yeah... Now i got it, and it's the garbage. All the content as been moves to the left side leaving a big white area at the right, and there are recomended videos in my subscribtion list. Also there is no way to only show uploads from the people you subscribe.

So... How do i get the old YouTube back? Do i really have to switch to Firefox or IE? Because on those browsers YouTube hasn't changed.

It's a God-awful mess. How do I look at large numbers of comments now? Do I have to click "more" 87 times? Where's the "flag" for spam comments? Is there a way I can NOT needlessly load thumbnails (avatars)?

This is complete bullshit. Being un-centered on a bigger screen (even 24") looks horrible. I think they even removed the sorting options from the search. The new recommendations shouldn't be even mentioned.

I really want the old UI back as I do not care for the "Now Playing" part. When I go to YouTube, I want to see videos from my subscriptions and only my subscriptions. I don't want to see recommendations or things people have shared on Google+!

Why is sorting removed? Will sorely miss this if the new UI is implemented in its current form. Also, don;t think the new UI is cool. Like the current skin a lot more. It has a "polished" sense to it - much of it is down to the grey used, I guess.

So to see vids by same user I have to go to a new page? Horrible! Stop using cheesy algorithms to think you know what I want to watch: YOU DON'T! My tastes are rather esoteric and why I like a channel is not based on cross referencing mass tag viewerships.

Just let me see the vids by the same user IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. 90%+ of what I watched are in numbered series. Google's algorithm can't even list numbers correctly!

Why did you eliminate the option above the playing video to see more videos from the selected user that you could view without leaving the current page? I liked that, so I guess that's why it was changed. :0P

Why does it have to be all white??? It's horrible. Just opening the youtube home page makes my eyes hurt. And no options at all? No dark theme or option so my head doesn't pound when browsing? Thank you for making me hate YouTube. I can't justify the guaranteed headaches to use it.

The changes affect the use of youtube on external sites negatively: 1 Displayed video width on new uploads seems to miss a couple of pixels. 2 Compression creates ugly generated stills.3 The option to add the hd-version to the short url is gone.I'm considering switching all of our content to vimeo.